Holodomor Essay

Genocide is the killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group to destroy the entire nation. Genocide has been a tragic part of human history for centuries. There are many examples throughout history of genocide being carried out by those seeking to eliminate specific groups of people. Genocide has also been carried out in more recent history. During the 1990s, over 800,000 Tutsi people were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in the Rwandan genocide. The world largely failed to intervene to stop the bloodshed repeatedly.

The Holocaust is one of the more known genocide. The Holocaust started on January 30, 1933, and ended on May 8, 1945. Al Miller, a Holocaust survivor, once said, “The Holocaust didn’t start with

The Holodomor only lasted a year, from 1932 until 1933 in the late spring, and happened during the Holocaust. “Honoring the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, in which more than two million Ukrainian Jews died, Ukraine calls on Israel to also recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.” (Volodymyr Zelensky, unknown). The word Holodomor means death by hunger, in Ukrainian, which refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was seen as an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian people, who resisted Soviet policies. The cause of this genocide is because of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin gained power in the USSR by using his position as party general secretary to gain control of the Communist Party and kept it by removing his opponents, including the first people that installed communism in Russia. “A famine that came about without drought and without war.” (Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I). It is impossible to determine the exact number of people that died during the Holodomor but it is an estimated 3.5 million to 7 million. The Holodomor was denied by the Soviet government and the Communist party but later was said to be true and is still taught in classrooms in Ukraine